“Funders always want to jump on a train that’s already moving,” says Candace Eudaley-Loebach, a grant writer and elementary school parent in Dubuque, Iowa. “If we hadn’t had the CDBG, I don’t think parents would have the energy and the excitement about being involved to help with the different things.”
With her school’s parent group and the help of a federally funded Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), Eudaley-Loebach successfully upgraded her daughter’s school playground into the ideal park-on-the-block. Kids and parents from the neighborhood chose the equipment, drew the layout, and eventually started using the new space for walks, picnics, and playtime, on school days and on weekends.
The Lincoln Elementary School park received a grand opening last fall.
“So many people are saying how much better the neighborhood looks because of it,” Eudaley-Loebach says.
The CDBG program Eudaley-Loebach accessed has been around since the mid-1970s, and affects every community in the United States. Through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the program disburses about $3.5 billion in federal funds a year to more than a thousand different state, county, and municipal governments to make certain types of low- to middle-income neighborhood improvements. The use of the funds is flexible, and big cities and rural towns alike run CDBG-boosted projects.
Despite the popularity of these grants, in May the Trump administration suggested completely canceling CDBG.
But both the relevant House and Senate committees subsequently voted to fund the program in their budgets. Vicki Watson, executive director of the National Community Development Association (NCDA), thinks the advocacy of her members is part of why support for the program stays strong. The NCDA was founded in 1969, to aid local governments in accessing and using federal programs like CDBG. “We ask members to invite their congressional members back to the district to tour different projects or meet with beneficiaries, to see how the program’s working in their area, and they see that it’s working,” says Watson. “I’ve been working with it for almost 30 years and it does work and it makes a big difference.”
The grant goes to infrastructure improvements that serve low- to moderate-income communities, and also affordable housing, economic development, and public services for entire municipalities. CDBG projects must either serve low- and moderate-income people, address urgent health and safety needs in the community, or help eliminate slums and blight.
In a letter accompanying the administration’s 2026 “skinny budget” proposal, Russell T. Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, justified proposing cutting federal funds from local communities by claiming that the federal government “has intruded on matters best left to the levels of government closest to the people, who understand and respect the needs and desires of their communities far better than the Federal Government ever could.” Ironically, Vought’s letter couldn’t have described any better how CDBG already works—it’s a program that lets those closest to the problems decide on how to spend federal funds to solve them.
More Than Playgrounds
Along with improvements like Lincoln Elementary’s school park, Maddie Haverland, Dubuque’s urban development and housing rehabilitation project manager, has recently used CDBG to rehab the Dubuque Rescue Mission; the local YMCA’s domestic violence shelter; Maria House, a transitional shelter for women and children; and St. John’s Almost Home, the only shelter in the city dedicated to single fathers. Haverland’s department also channeled CDBG to install wall-mounted air conditioning in Bishop’s Block, an affordable housing high-rise, and to replace elevators at Ecumenical Towers, an assisted housing development for seniors.
“Most of them have mobility barriers and it’s a several story building,” Haverland says. “And then, of course, it’s really difficult for first responders to be able to get to the patients in the building if the elevators weren’t working.”
Dubuque’s Neighborhood Revitalization division of its Housing and Community Development Department also leverages the fact that CDBG can count as a local match for grants that require matching funds. As an example, Haverland says they are able to use CDBG as a local match for HUD’s Lead Hazard Control Grant, allowing the city to replace windows and stabilize painted surfaces in older buildings. The match allows Dubuque to unlock another $300,000 per year to treat lead in its aging buildings—a hazard that can especially harm young children.
Globalization Leaves a Vacancy
Further down the Mississippi, the city of St. Louis also relies on CDBG to fund a number of projects. These projects have a public face, but few people know that CDBG creates the underlying foundation for them.
“That’s preschools, it’s daycares, it’s Head Starts, it’s Meals on Wheels, it’s literacy, it’s after-school clubs, it’s Boys & Girls Clubs,” says Tom Nagel, public information officer for St. Louis’s Community Development Administration, which distributes federal, state, and local funds to the city’s nonprofits and other agencies.
Nagel says he spends part of his time explaining to the city’s residents how CDBG funds more familiar programs like those named above. He spends another part addressing the city’s huge holdings of housing stock accumulated over decades of population decline.
Since its peak in 1950 at more than 850,000 people, it has lost more than 65 percent of its residents as major employers left the city for international locations, and now the city has a population of under 280,000. Large businesses like Anheuser-Busch, Purina, and Monsanto once called St. Louis their home, and as they were absorbed into international companies with headquarters located elsewhere, countless jobs have left the region.
In the wake of so many residents moving out of the city, many properties have been abandoned, leaving the city owning over 9,000 vacant buildings to date, according to Nagel.
In an effort to get these properties rehabbed and purchased by locals who will pay taxes and the cost of maintenance, Nagel works with multiple nonprofit developers who rely on CDBG funding together with other sources to fill financial gaps and make the properties affordable.
[RELATED: In St. Louis, Artist Housing Opens Up Homeownership Opportunities]
The St. Louis Art Place Initiative, a nonprofit that rehabilitates city properties specifically for artists to purchase, relies on CDBG to price its homes at below market value. Through Nagel’s office, CDBG covers the Initiative’s costs for preliminary steps like environmental reviews, engineering, legal work, and design.
“I call my professional field ‘arts based community development.’ I’m obviously not the only one that calls it that but I think it’s kind of an unfamiliar phrase perhaps,” says Kaveh Razani, co-director of the Initiative. “It’s a lot of land maintenance and development work and that sort of thing, but it’s leveraging art to do it.”
To assure that the properties stay affordable in the future, rehabbed homes sold through the Initiative come with a deed restriction that offers the organization the first right of refusal to buy the house back for the original price plus a percentage increase based on area median income change over the time it was owned, keeping the home affordable to low- to middle-income homebuyers, while giving the departing homeowner some profit.
Room For Improvement, Not Elimination
Examples of the resourceful use of CDBG funds exist across the country, but it is true the program could be better.
Mainly, say local officials, the funding is too low, not too high. The $3.5 billion per year codified in 1974 fluctuates a little every year, but has not been adjusted for inflation for years, so the effective funding has been steadily falling. In 2024 dollars the initial allocation would be closer to $15 billion.
“When you don’t adjust it for inflation, it just means that less people are being served with the program over time and that’s unfortunate. But that’s what’s happening,” says Watson.
Another problem arises from how long locals must wait before federal funds reach them.
Mandy Bartle, president and CEO of the South Florida Community Land Trust, partners with many South Florida municipalities to create affordable homes for residents of the area, where real estate prices and rents are among the highest in the country.
“The real estate market moves fast, and traditionally federal programs and dollars move slow,” says Bartle. While many federally funded programs are subject to bureaucratic delays, building affordable homes in a costly market makes the delays caused by CDBG, as regular as they might be, even more expensive.
“Construction costs in the last couple years—just since the pandemic—have grown tremendously. And so while we’re waiting on those federal dollars to get in place, costs are going up,” she says.
Nonetheless, Bartle finds CDBG to be essential to her work. South Florida CLT uses CDBG funds to bring down the final price in the very competitive South Florida market, where average buyers are often outbid by cash offers.
CDBG funds are “used as gap funding to write down the difference between what it costs to build the homes and what people could afford,” she says.
The ability to combine loans with CDBG to close the gap between construction costs and what the buyer can actually afford is one way to address the housing crisis.
“In this market where the cost of land and construction costs keep soaring and the wages remain stagnant,” says Bartle, “without these grants and subsidies the math just doesn’t add up. We need the public subsidies, the private sector, and philanthropic investments all working together to solve this problem.”
CDBG Money Goes Further
Every dollar goes a long way in local hands through the CDBG program. A 2017 HUD report showed that every $1 invested from CDBG nearly quadrupled when the community leveraged it. Usually, a ripple effect spreads across the improved area, opening new doors.
Not long after the opening of the Lincoln Elementary playground, Eudaley-Loebach’s parent group was able to obtain other grants to help improve upon and maintain the project going forward. It even inspired her daughter, a fourth grader at the time, to write her own successful grant for garbage collection and maintenance of the park.
On a broader spectrum, the project could actually affect how local residents view the government itself.
“There’s a sense of community pride that you get when you go to the neighborhood school and the neighborhood school gets this project completed with the help of the city and funds from the federal government,” says Dubuque mayor Brad Cavanagh.
“If people connect the dots, it goes all the way to even building a trust in government all the way up to the federal level.”
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